There is a lack of research which identifies factors related to the utilization of community health nursing services by patients with a medical or surgical diagnosis. Agency administrators have need of such information in order to plan programs to meet patients' needs, target scarce resources and develop staff in service programs. Third party payers and health policy makers need information on the types of community health nursing care necessary for patients with different DRGs in anticipation of prospective payment for home health care services. The purpose of this exploratory research is to determine the predictive power of patients' nursing classification, functional status, aid from family and friends, family coping, sociodemographic, medical classification, and agency variables with respect to utilization of the following measures of community health nursing services: a) number of visits, b) duration of care, c) time spent on visits, d) days between visits, e) readmission to a home health agency. A prospective correlational design will be used to answer the research questions. The sample will consist of 475 subjects with a medical or surgical diagnosis who are new patients of an official home health agency. The duration of the study is expected to be five years. Data on the independent variables will be collected by patient interviews, observation of community health nurses in the routine delivery of home nursing care, patient and family assessments completed by community health nurses, and existing agency data sources. Measures of nursing service utilization will be collected from computerized agency data following patients' discharge from the agency. A follow-up study will be conducted six months after patients' discharge from the agency to identify factors related to subsequent admission or non-readmission to the agency. Regression analysis is the overall strategy being planned to analyze the data.